School's Profile Assessed

Northwestern Regional Outpaces Peers

January 02, 1997|By KEVIN CANFIELD; Courant Correspondent

Although students at Northwestern Regional School No. 7 outperformed their peers in recent academic testing, Superintendent Robert V. Fish said he still would like to see students perform better on standardized exams.

Fish was referring to the results of the recently released Strategic School Profiles for Northwestern, whose students come from Barkhamsted, Colebrook, New Hartford and Norfolk.

The profiles are compiled annually by the state Department of Education for each school district statewide. They compare the performance of a district's students to the state averages and the district's economic reference group. The reference group puts similar districts in one class, taking into consideration a variety of socioeconomic factors.

The profiles, which measure student performance in everything from attendance to academics to physical fitness, show that for the 1995-96 school year, 10th-graders outperformed their peers in the Connecticut Academic Performance Test. A higher percentage of Northwestern's 10th-graders met the mastery level in the math, science and interdisciplinary portions of the test than did their peers in the school's reference group. Only in language arts did the school's students lag slightly behind.

The Northwestern Class of 1995 also scored well on the Scholastic Assessment Tests. The average SAT score for students was 38 points higher than the reference group's average in the math portion and 28 points higher in the verbal area.

Despite the results, Fish said, he would still like to see the school's students do better on academic tests.

``Not enough kids are performing at that mastery level,'' he said. ``It's higher than the state level . . . but the thing is, it's not as high as we'd like it to be.''

School officials hope to draw more conclusions about the results of the current profile in years to come. Instead of trying to gauge progress in 12-month intervals, Fish said, administrators should look more at three- to five-year changes in student performance.

The profiles also found that:

* Northwestern's total hours of instruction per year -- 959 -- is lower than both the state and its reference group averages of 975 and 992, respectively.

---- * The school has a higher dropout rate -- 10.4 percent -- than the average school in its group -- 7.4 percent.